It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class…involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, ownership of motor vehicles, golf courses, small electric appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable…A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.

A paradigm shift begins, like all things, with an idea.You can call it a hypothesis, a speculation, a ‘what if,’ but it is an idea that asks people to think differently. They don’t occur very often partly because, as philosopher A.N. Whitehead said,

It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

However, certain ideas are attractive to people who see the potential for power and wealth or both. This was the case with environmentalism. A small group seized the idea of environmentalism and immediately took the moral high ground.

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself. At this point, the challenge is to convert ideas to action. It is where most ideas founder. The AGW idea didn’t founder because, unfortunately, a Canadian and member of COR, Maurice Strong, became the pivotal person with the skills to make it happen.

In 2001, Neil Hrab, a Canadian who spent much time monitoring and reporting on Strong wrote, Mainly using his (Strong) prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing private sector career success with stints in government and international groups It began in the 1977 at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm Conference. Hrab quotes from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The three specific goals set out by the Secretary General of the Conference, Maurice F. Strong, at its first plenary session—a Declaration on the human environment, an Action Plan, and an organizational structure supported by a World Environment Fund—were all adopted by the Conference. He also noted: What’s truly alarming about Maurice Strong is his actual record. Strong’s persistent calls for an international mobilization to combat environmental calamities, even when they are exaggerated (population growth) or scientifically unproven (global warming), have set the world’s environmental agenda. We know how Strong, as a member of the COR, took the ideas and translated them into policy. Elaine Dewar, an investigative journalist, and another Canadian planned to write a book praising Canadian environmentalists. Her research showed that all the people on the list were more corrupt than the people they were attacking. Dewar wrote a book titled Cloak of Green with at least 20 % on Strong that included details on five days with him at UN headquarters. After those days with Strong at the UN Dewar concluded, “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.” The overall aim was exploitation of environmentalism, using the secondary issue of global warming. Strong knew that the best way to achieve his goal was through the bureaucrats at the UN and the bureaucrats at every National Weather Office in every UN member nation. He knew what US social commentator Mary McCarthy warned. Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, is becoming the modern form of despotism.

To McCarthy it was a threat, to Strong it was the potential for total, unaccountable control. He set up the entire COR objective under the organization he created called the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The overall control of politics and science is shown in Figure 1.

The IPCC was critical to creating the science needed to ‘prove’ human CO2 was causing global warming. It was easily achieved by the definition given it by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that limited them to only human causes of climate change. It was at this juncture another Canadian became directly involved. The founding meeting of the IPCC occurred in Villach Austria in 1985 and was chaired by Canadian scientists Gordon McBean. Later McBean became an Assistant Deputy Minister at Environment Canada (EC). In that role, he supervised and directed the department to convince politicians of the legitimacy and accuracy of the IPCC science.

The program to create and push the deception that human CO2 was causing global warming was primarily the brainchild and successful because of Canadian Maurice Strong. He applied it in complete form when, in 1992 he became Chairman of Ontario Hydro, the government agency that controlled all energy production in the Province. It destroyed the economy of Ontario taking it from the best performer of all Canadian provinces to one of the poorest. People are still paying for the damage he did and will for years to come. Politicians still lack the knowledge about the bad science. Even if you accept the bad science, the cost of reducing global temperature by controlling CO2 is not tenable. They are still afraid of attacks from the eco-bullies. However, a majority are prepared to take an economic stand. Bjorn Lomborg puts in even more stark terms.

The climate impact of all Paris INDC promises is minuscule: if we measure the impact of every nation fulfilling every promise by 2030, the total temperature reduction will be 0.048°C (0.086°F) by 2100. (His emphasis).

Even if we assume that these promises would be extended for another 70 years, there is still little impact: if every nation fulfills every promise by 2030 and continues to fulfill these promises faithfully until the end of the century, and there is no ‘CO₂ leakage’ to non-committed nations, the entirety of the Paris promises will reduce temperature rises by just 0.17°C (0.306°F) by 2100.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”